Thursday, February 13, 2014

There are two types
of roe: hard and soft. The former comes from female fish and contains the egg, and
the latter, sometimes called melts, are from the male fish and contain the
sperm. This recipe, just like the other two, use soft roes. Eating the sperm
sac of a fish might appear to be more of an ordeal than a pleasure, but they
are tasty and can be picked up very cheaply at the fishmongers. Alternatively,
when buying mackerel or herring, you can ask the fishmonger to keep behind any
roes that might be present as he scales and guts them. At home, simply sequester
them in a freezer bag until you have for a recipe. They are an acquired taste
because they are very slightly bitter and so they lend themselves to creamy and
buttery ingredients (for example see #159
Creamed Roe Loaves).

Jane makes a point for this recipe to try
and buy nice neat matching pairs of roes, rather than just the cast offs that
‘have been flung on to a separate tray’. I would have thought that this recipe
would be perfect for the roes that are so carelessly thrown onto the roe tray. Not
that this happens anymore – because they are not so popular these days, you almost
always have to buy frozen packs.

This recipe just shows how the British just
loved to pot things: meat, fish, cheese. It can all be potted and preserved for
a later date. In this case the roe paste will only last maybe 4 or 5 days in
the fridge, but that’s a lot longer than raw roes would last.

To make your roe paste, first fry 7 ounces
of soft herring or mackerel roes in
an ounce of butter, then, Jane says,
to pass them through a sieve.

This was a tricky task, which was made much
easier by the utilisation of my mouli-legumes.
Beat the warm roes into 6 ounces of softened
butter. Jane recommends using slightly salted butter, but I have to say, I
prefer normal, salted, butter; after all you’ll only add more salt when it
comes to seasoning later!

Next, mix in a tablespoon of double cream, then season with salt, Cayenne pepper and lemon
juice. Finally add a little chopped parsley.

‘Serve chilled, but not chilled to
hardness, with thin toast or baked sliced of bread.’

#391
Soft Roe Paste. I liked this paste, the bitter flavour of the roes was cut
with the lemon, cream and parsley whilst still maintaining the roe flavour.
However, it didn’t exactly make me do backflips. Good, but not great, and
nowhere near the dizzy height of previous fishy pastes like #378
Elizabeth David’s Potted Crab.
5.5/10.

Friday, February 7, 2014

I’ve been putting this one off for ages
because it starts with the sentence: “A very similar recipe to the [#133] Welsh Supper Herrings”. These
were not good; pappy fishy cat food mush and raw potatoes. However, that was 5
years ago (5 YEARS!) and I like to think of myself as a better cook now than in
those naïve days.

This recipe comes from a Mrs Suzanne
Woolley who ran a restaurant called Mheillea
(‘Harvest Man’) on the Isle of Man. Normally herrings would have been cooked
with potatoes as in Wales, but she decided to make a pie of them. Aside from
that, it’s pretty much the same as the Welsh Supper Herrings. This did not bode
well.

Mrs Woolley's book - still avaialable!

First of all you need to make or buy some shortcrust pastry, large enough to line
and lid a baking dish large enough to hold the ingredients of the pie. A small
lasagne-style dish would be appropriate. Line the dish and keep it in the fridge.
Reserve the pastry for the lid in the fridge too.

Next, prepare 6 herrings. You need to scale, gut and bone them. Or ask your fishmonger
to do it. Boning herring is actually a pretty straight-forward job, as you need
no filleting skills whatsoever. I can’t put it better than Jane herself:

Cut
off heads, fins and tails and bone them: to do this, put the herring on a
board, backbone up, spreading out the slit sides of the belly. Press gently
along the backbone from neck to tail, until you feel the bone giving. Turn the
herring over, and you will find you can pick out the backbone complete with
most of the whiskery bones still attached (separate bones can be pulled out).

It’s worth mentioning that you need really
fresh firm herrings for this. If they’re just a few days’ old, they will have
started to go mushy, and the procedure described by Jane above will be most
unsuccessful.

Next, season them on both sides with salt, black pepper and groundmace (about ½ a teaspoon should do it).
Spread some softened butter over the
base of the pie and arrange the herrings on top. Peel, core and slice 3
good-sized cooking apples and thinly
slice 2 medium onions. Put the apple
on next to forma layer, then the onions. Place dots of butter over the top, season again with salt and pepper, then
sprinkle over 4 tablespoons of water.

Roll out the remainder of the pastry,
sealing the pie with some beaten egg
or cream. Make a hole in the middle
of the pie so that steam can escape and brush the lid with your egg or cream.

Bake at 180-190⁰C for 40 minutes or so. “Check
after 30 minutes”, says Grigson, “by pushing a larding needle or skewer through
the central hole of the lid, so that it pierces the herring; you should be able
to feel whether the herrings are cooked by the way the needle or skewer goes
in.”

And there you have it. I assume the pie was
supposed to be a self-contained meal, maybe a suitable salad could be served
alongside it.

#390 Isle
of Man Herring Pie. Well I have to say I’ve not had a really terrible
recipe from English Food in quite a
while, so I was well overdue. The herring just did not go with the apples at
all; it would at least have ben palatable as an apple and onion pie. I cannot
see how this recipe made it into any cookbook! Really bad. Went straight in the
bin. 1/10.